GRIP will not start. The black command window show the commands in the run.bat file but nothing else happens.

There are 2 versions of the .bat file: run.bat is for 32-bit systems and run64.bat is for 64-bit ones. You must also have the matching JRE: 32- or 64-bit. Even if your operating system is 64-bit it is possible that a 32-bit JRE has been installed. But in that case you really want to change to 64-bit JRE in order to be able to use all of your RAM for holding images. On Oracle's download page make sure you get the x64 version rather than x86.

You are running GRIP from a directory (folder) to which you do not have permission to write. The file grip.properties is GRIP's configuration file. If it is absent, which it will be the first time you run GRIP, the program tries to create the file, containing simple default settings.The problem can arise in Windows (for example) if you put GRIP in a directory that requires administrator privileges but then try to run GRIP as an ordinary user.The simplest solution is to put GRIP in one of your own user directories.Thanks to Phil for pointing out this problem.

GRIP runs but fails with "Out of memory" errors even if only 1 or 2 images have been opened (especially in batch processes).

Check which version of Java you are running (in a command window type java -version). If it is a 64-bit server version (which it might well be on a Windows 7 system, even if it is a laptop!) the problem is probably due to the fact that a parallel garbage collector is used. The problem can be solved by changing the contents of the file run.bat to

The values for -Xms and -Xmx nust be rather less than the amount of physical RAM available in your system. The example would be suitable for a system having 4Gbytes of RAM.

GRIP is very slow. Eg, it takes very much longer than 5 seconds to load an image file.

Check how much RAM your machine has. GRIP's run.bat file contains the text "-Xms768m -Xmx1024m". This means that the JVM will start with 768Mbytes of memory and may if necessary expand that to 1024Mbytes (ie, 1Gbyte). If your physical RAM is smaller than either of those figures the JVM's memory will be partly mapped to disc. In that case GRIP will cause a lot of swapping of data between RAM and disc. You will therefore need to edit run.bat so that the memory sizes are smaller, to fit within physical RAM.

GRIP will not open my RAW image file

GRIP uses a third party JAR file, called jrawio, for opening RAW image files. Camera manufacturers are continually enhancing their RAW file formats so it is hard for the maintainers of jrawio to keep up to date. Check at Tidal Wave to see whether there is a newer version. Alternatively there may now be other suppliers of Java code for reading RAW images. The important thing is that they must be compatible with the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) standard for plug-in readers/writers. They almost certainly will be. To use any new image reader JAR file, edit the single line in GRIP's run.bat file so that the semicolon-separated list of JAR files following -cp contains the new one.Work-around: first convert your images to 16-bit TIFF format, either using your camera manufacturer's supplied software or by using Adobe Photoshop or other RAW processing software. Be careful though that the conversion software does not automatically modify the data (eg, to apply "picture styles").

The help options do not work

Ensure you have unzipped the help files to the correct folder relative to where GRIP is installed. This diagram shows how the GRIP directory should look for running the application.